Monday, April 18, 2011

This is essentially a GNOME 3.0-specific update to New evdev middle mouse button emulation defaults. In recent evdev versions, middle mouse button emulation is disabled by default and can be enabled with Option "Emulate3Buttons" "on" in the xorg.conf file or an xorg.conf.d snippet.

GNOME 3.0 has a gsettings key to also trigger this behaviour on a per-user basis (see bug 633863). The default value is off (false). Settings applied from the desktop environment overwrite xorg.conf(.d) settings, so to get middle button emulation in GNOME simply toggle the gsettings key and don't worry about xorg.conf(.d). The command to toggle the key is: